Unveiling the Secrets of the Singapore Stone: A Digital Philology Investigation (Research Grant)

Activity: Other

Description

PERONO CACCIAFOCO, Francesco (PI) - "Unveiling the Secrets of the Singapore Stone: A Digital Philology Investigation" - Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF), Grant Number: SURF-2025-0032, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), Suzhou (Jiangsu), China, 2025

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The Singapore Stone is an enigmatic sandstone epigraph which was re-discovered in 1819 at the mouth of the Singapore River and blown up by the British in 1843. Its text was and is totally undeciphered, because its writing system is unique (not attested anywhere else in the world). Only three fragments were recovered, after its destruction. Sent to India to be interpreted, only one, currently hosted at the local National Museum, was returned to Singapore in 1918. Attempts at deciphering the text have been unsuccessful, so far. This project aims at trying to recover the missing parts of the text of the slab (which originally measured around 3 meters per 3 meters, with about 52 lines of inscription) by implementing the functions of an algorithm (called 'Read-y Grammarian') specially developed for this task which, on the basis of the extant characters and lines, can 'guess', like a 'prediction machine', the contents of the missing parts of the epigraph, through an original process of Digital Philology.
Period2 Jun 2025 → 29 Aug 2025
Held atSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences
Degree of RecognitionNational

Keywords

  • Singapore Stone
  • Language Deciphering
  • Cryptanalysis
  • Historical Linguistics
  • Computational Linguistics

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